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Carlyle Brown

Carlyle Brown is the curator and artistic director of the Minneapolis-based Carlyle Brown & Company, where he is also a playwright/performer. An alumnus of New Dramatists and a Lifetime Core Writer at the Playwrights’ Center, has received numerous fellowships and awards including the Black Theatre Network’s Winona Lee Fletcher Award for Outstanding Achievement and Excellence (2006), a Guggenheim Fellowship (2009), the Otto Rene Castillo Award for Political Theatre (2010), a United States Artist Fellowship (2010), the William Inge Award for Distinguished Achievement in the American Theater (2018), and the Hellen Merrill Award (2019). A scholar and historian, Brown has been an artist-in-residence or visiting professor at several colleges and universities. He curated the 2018 Cultural Diaspora Residency at the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France, and the subsequent “Afro-Atlantic Playwrights’ Festival” at the Playwrights’ Center in July 2019. His solo shows include The Fula from America: An African Journey, Therapy and Resistance, Acting Black (created to inspire open and honest conversations about race and diversity), and The History of Religion.

A man stands in an empty rehearsal space while a women sits across from him with a laptop.
On Collaborative Evolution with Friendship at its Core
Essay

On Collaborative Evolution with Friendship at its Core

21 August 2023

After three decades of working together as playwright and director, collaborators and friends Carlyle Brown and Noel Raymond are trying something new: co-creating a theatrical work and performing in it. They sit down to discuss the project’s genesis in their friendship and the research, questions, and experiences that are shaping their generative process.

A woman seated in a wheelchair speaks passionately to a man squatting in front of her.
Playwright Caregivers
Essay

Playwright Caregivers

6 July 2023

Playwrights Carlyle Brown, Elaine Romero, and Catherine Filloux come together to discuss their experiences as working theatre artists who also act as caregivers to their spouses.

Four senior actors stand on-stage and look at their scripts during a rehearsal.
Elder Dramaturgy
Essay

Elder Dramaturgy

7 March 2023

Playwright Carlyle Brown describes his journey with the play We Take Care of Our Own by Zainabu Jallo, detailing the joys and challenges that come from work featuring characters in their eighties and nineties.

Close on the faces of three actors staring into the camera.
The Fight for the Right to Vote
Essay

The Fight for the Right to Vote

13 January 2022

Carlyle Brown’s Down in Mississippi is a celebration of a movement that gave birth to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Brown sat down with Todd London in October 2020 to discuss the creative process, historical context, and contemporary resonance of his play.